Tag Archives: asymmetric branching

Looking through the literature on SAT solvers, it is rare to find any algorithm that uses a form of time-memory trade-off. In fact, it is rare to find any algorithm that uses too much memory. This also shows up in practice, as it’s rare to find a SAT solver using too much memory. This translates to the following: if a SAT solver can in an effective way utilize the typically abundant memory, that SAT solver will have an advantage. Based on this logic, I think CryptoMiniSat is doing good.

What I have realised is that it’s great to know all the literals we can reach from any given literal. Let me explain. Let’s say we have a look at literal “v1”, i.e. “v1 = true”. We propagate this literal as usual, and we reach a set of literals that are implied. For example, we reach “v2, v3, -v4”. This knowledge is regularly computed by modern SAT solvers, but is also quickly thrown away. I advocate keeping this, and here is why. There are a number of very interesting things we can do with these, three of which I have found useful.

Number one. This is the best, and the least obvious one. The algorithm used for computing equivalent literals (i.e. “v1 = -v2” or “v1 = v4”) is a variation of Tarjan’s algorithm for finding strongly connected components (SCC). This algorithm requires a set of binary clauses such as “-v1 v2” and “v1 -v2” as input to find equivalent literals, in the example case “v1 = -v2”. The most obvious way to “feed” this algorithm with information is to give it all the binary clauses we have. But that misses out on all the binary clauses that are not directly apparent in the problem, but could be derived from the problem. For example, if “-v1 -v4” was not directly in the problem, SCC cannot find the equivalence “v1 = v4”. Naturally, by using our cache, we can be sure that “-v1 -v4” is part of the problem (since “v1” propagates “-v4”). So, using this cache, we can substantially increase the power of SCC. More equivalent literals lead to less variables, and an overall faster solving.

Number two. Clause vivification is a method to make the original clauses of the problem shorter. It’s a relatively simple algorithm that enqueues the literals in the clauses one-by-one and checks if their propagation leads to a conflict. If so, then the clause can be shortened. With the cache, we can do something similar, though less powerful in terms of reasoning power, but far more effective in terms of speed. The trick is to simply try every single literal in the clause: if a literal propagates the inverse of another literal in the clause, we can remove it. For example, if the clause is “a b -c”, and in the cache for “b” there is “f,g,h,j,-c”, then we know that conceptually there exists a clause “-b -c”, which means we can now remove “b” from the original clause, using the the self-subsuming resolution rule. This form of vivification is, although technically less strong than normal vivification, is typically 50-100x faster than normal vivification and is almost as powerful. This kind of speed advantage means it can essentially be carried out without (time) penalty.

Number three. When generating conflict clauses, MiniSat-type conflict minimisation has now become commonplace. This uses the clauses involved in the conflict to carry out self-subsuming resolution on the conflict clause generated. Just as with clause vivification, we can use our cache to carry out self-subsuming resolution with the (conceptually binary) clauses stored in the cache. This is not much different from clause vivification, but it allows us to do simplification in the middle of a restart, instead of patiently waiting for the restart to end. Furthermore, it can uncover that certain learnt clauses can become binary, thus alleviating the problem of cleaning “useless” learnt clauses that could have become binary through, e.g. clause vivification.

I am aware that all the above three could be carried out without a cache — in fact, CryptoMiniSat could do (and most of the time did) all of the above without it. The advantage of having the cache is speed: things that used to take immense amounts of time can now be done really fast. However, what interests me the most in this cache, is the new uses that will come of it. I was originally only aware of number (3), then when I realised (1), I dived deep and realised that (2) can be done. I think more uses will eventually emerge.

The new solver can now solve 221 problems from the SAT Competition of 2009 within the same timing&CPU constraints, while the 2.5.0 (i.e. SAT Race) version could only solve 217. Here is a comparison plot:

The cut-off for the competition for these machines was approx at 5000 sec. As can be seen from the graph (which goes until 6000 sec), the new solver does even better in the longer run: the additions seem to improve the long-term behaviour.

As for the future, I think there is still a lot of things to do. For example, the solver still doesn’t have blocked clause elimination, which could help, and it is still missing some ideas that others have published. Notably, it doesn’t do on-the-fly subsumption at every step of the conflict generation process, only at the very last step. In case you are interested to add any of these in a transparent manner, feel free to hack away at the git repository.

Edited to Add (3/09/2010): The performance of CryptoMiniSat on the SAT Race 2010 problems has also changed with the new version. The new CryptoMiniSat can now solve 75 problems (instead of 74) within the time limit. More importantly, the average time to solve these 75 instances has decreased considerably, to around 111 seconds per instance (from 138 s/inst), which is very close to the results of lingeling, an extremely fast and very advanced solver. There is still a lot to be learnt from lingeling, however: its memory footprint is far smaller, and its preprocessing techniques in some areas are much better than that of CryptoMiniSat.

Asymmetric branching is an algorithm that shortens CNF clauses in SAT Solvers. A clause, for instance v1 V v2 V v3 V v4 (where letters are binary variables and V represents binary OR) could possibly be shortened to v1 V v2 V v3. To find out if it can be, all we have to do is to put -v1,-v2 and -v3 into the propagation queue and then propagate. If we receive a conflict from the propagation engine, we can learn the clause v1 V v2 V v3, which (incidentally, though this was the point), subsumes the original clause, so we can simply remove variable v4 from the original clause.

Ok, so much for theory. Now comes the hard part: how do we do this such that it actually speeds up the solving? The problem is that asymmetric branching, when done on all possible clauses, is slow. However, its benefits could be large, since a shortened clause naturally leads a faster propagation and shorter resolution proofs thus less propagation need.

I have been experimenting in getting some benefit from asymmetric branching, and now it works extremely well for CryptoMiniSat. The trick I use, is that I first sort the clauses according to size, and only try to shorten with asymmetric branching the top couple of clauses. This ensures that the largest clauses are shortened first. Since the largest clauses contribute most the to size of the resolution proof and they are the slowest to propagate, this makes sense.

CryptoMiniSat tries to do asymmetric branching regularly, always for only a little while (~2 seconds). I believe this is useful, because as the amount of time the program has been trying to solve a problem increases, it makes sense that we have a bit more time to do things that could help resolve the problem faster. For instance, if CryptoMiniSat has been trying to solve a given problem for 30 minutes unsuccessfully with the standard clause-learning DPLL procedure in vain, we can allocate 2-3 seconds to possibly gain ~5-10% later. In the example case it can be assumed that since we haven’t been able to solve it for 30 minutes, probably we won’t solve it in the next 10 minutes, so gaining 5% on 10 minutes is 30 seconds, far more than the 2-3 seconds we invested.

The results with asymmetric branching with CryptoMiniSat are quite astounding. Using the 2009 SAT Competition benchmark set with an approximately correct timeout, CryptoMiniSat could normally solve 217 problems. With asymmetric branching, CryptoMiniSat can now solve 220 — a huge increase: last year, 16 solvers running in parallel could only solve 229 instances in total.

Edited to add (26/09/2010): Clause Vivification by Piette, Hamadi and Sais is a paper about the above described method, though with a number of key differences. The paper seems to advocate for a complete procedure, furthermore, it calls the conflict generation routine in certain cases. I believe that the above described way of carrying out this technique brings more tangible benefits, especially for larger problems.

(Updated: we need to branch on the inverse of the clause’s literals. Thanks to Vegard Nossum for spotting this)